PayPal mistakes own email for phishing attack

Banks and financial institutions are fond of lecturing customers about the perils of phishing emails, the bogus messages that attempt to trick marks into handing over their login credentials to fraudulent sites. Yet many undo this good work by sending out emails themselves that invite users to click on a link and log into their account rather than going a safer route and telling users to use bookmarked versions of their site.

The problems of the former approach are neatly illustrated by a blog posting by Randy Abrams, a former Microsoft staffer who is now director of technical education at anti-virus firm Eset. Abrams complained about the inclusion of a link in an email from PayPal as it looked rather too much like a phishing email.

PayPal support staffers responded not by noting that Abrams may have a point, which it would consider, but by treating its own email - which it acknowledged was "suspicious-looking" - as a phishing attack.

"Not even PayPal support can tell the difference between a legitimate PayPal email and a phishing attack," Abrams notes.

PayPal is one of the most phished brands on the internet, a back-handed tribute to the eBay subsidiary's success in the online payment market, so it would do well to listen to Abrams' advice not to include links to login pages in genuine communiques. Many banks make exactly the same security faux pas, as many Reg correspondents over the years will attest, and also need to revise their procedures. ®